SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Wednesday launched a test version of a
translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen
languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue.

The service "in effect, will make the Web universal," Google vice president
of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet
search giant's campus in Mountain View, California, last week.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages," Manber
said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will
be there."

Google's new software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches of
the Internet and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and
simplified Chinese.

The service is to eventually be expanded to include other languages.

"Here at Google, part of our mission is to make the world's information
universally accessible to our users, regardless of differences such as
language," the company said in a release.

"We are happy to announce the arrival of a new cross-language search feature
that allows users across the world to find and view search results on foreign
language web pages in their own native language."